Visual Effect Over Saturation in Modern Games - When Will it Stop?

ore and more we see games which are considered "pretty" by the gaming community because they are lathered in shiny effects.
Battlefield 4 is a particularly guilty offender, it gives me the feeling that DICE intentionally set out not to make a game look nice comparatively to other video games, but to real-life. Whats up with this? Well its a one giant marketing play. The more overwhelming the game appears the more its considered "pretty" by YouTube commenters.
Instead of working on artefacts which improve immersion of the subconscious like dynamically interactive physics, subtle GI (not the over powering crap that bathes everything in violent shades) and particle behaviours they mask this with a no-so-modest dose of BS.

I'm not saying modern mainstream games are ugly, they get away with this cacophony of eye candy if the games art stye complements it. What does badger me however is when something that fancies itself "the most realistic MMS to date" coddles its player-base into believing that lens flares can be seen by the naked eye. Or scratched and dusty highlights to lit artefacts are a hallmark of healthy ocular vision. If a Battlefield fanboy said: "OMG this looks better than real life!" I would politely point him to an optician.

Don't misunderstand me, I know why this is so commonly seen. In the heat of the game you can hypothetically trick you subconscious into believing that artefacts flying around the screen are real, Its helped by lighting and shader effects, but what mainstream studios seem to ignore is the millions of dollars done in research on this exact mental phenomenon.

Bottom line

You WILL feel more immersed if more development attention is paid to the subtle. Your "decisive conscious" needs very little stimulation, its already immersed in aiming properly, how many rounds you still have and "where the bloody hell did that tank come from?"
Its the subconscious that takes in the detail around you, texture resolutions and tiling are a HUGE factor. For more on this check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiQCz2NjPR8
The way particles interact with airflow and movement is another and this ties closely with the importance of physics.
We see it in action literally every day of our lives, we feel it too and the reason we don't overwhelm ourselves with information if you smash a glass for instance, is that our brain packets it into a set of behaviours that are expected of the fragments. Its not conscious though, you don't keep track of every shard, you just jump 3 feet on the air and bluster a few of your choicest swear-words.
Its so important then, that rubble and debris collide with one another, and bounce differently on different surfaces. Our brain goes "ew yuck" if we see half the wall disappear and half a second later re-appear as a jumble of grey "bits".

Putting it into context

Its far more important for developers to put effort into what we perceive but don't necessarily see, rather than shiny, glinting and tessellated nonsense. It has the exact same effect as staring at the horizon while you run and listen you your iPod. Your brain becomes uninterested in the details, thats why even though you didn't notice it, you cant remember the make of the lorry that flattened you.

New reason to call shooters "mindless" eh?

Check out my other articles ​

▌ ► Visual Effect Over Saturation in Modern Games - When Will it Stop?
▌ ► Unity 3D is Missing a Trick - Here's Why.
▌ ► On The Future of Video Games - There is hope! (Euclideon, Star Citizen Beyond)
▌ ► Modular Approach to Video Game Design Content Addition.
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Excellent article!
I don't think it's limited to games either: take ANY action/adventure movie in the last few years (The hobbit, Gravity, etc)

They all look amazing - and I love the 3D. However, your brain begins to regards some parts more like paintings, where in a lot of overly beautiful stuff was shoved into a single shot, which makes your brain go "yeah it's really pretty, but no way it's real life - it's too elaborate and too pretty"

 

In terms of effects, less is often more.

I'd love AAA-developers to start paying attention to the things that actually matter.
The last time I was blown away by the visuals of a game was in 2012, when I played Dear Esther. Being made on the Source Engine that is nowhere near as graphically capable as the CryEngine and Frostbite, it still is the best looking game ever in my opinion.

Good graphics = 50% technology + 50% art style

We have reached the point where technology won't do any major jump anymore.* Now work on the art goddamit.

Another example are WW2 shooters. They kind of give you the impression that colors weren't invented back in the 1940's.

Also: Sound-design.
For all their flaws, the games of TheChineseRoom are prime examples in terms of audio- and visualdesign. Dear Esther and Amnesia A Machine For Pigs look gorgeous and sound amazing.
Even without million dollar engines and all this fancy stuff, they can pull you in, in away not many other games can.


*Well, unless hardware magically becomes x-times more powerful games can be easily raytraced in realtime.

 

Hi Yuriy,
Thanks a lot, I try to post peices like this every now and again, they take a lot of research but are always fun
Its true that this effect extends to many digital mediums, games might be the worst offender as movies get away it by saying "oh its stylised" because no film is going to market its self as: "The most realistic looking movie ever".
Have you seen the trailer for the Godzilla 2014 remake? An excellent example of "painted movies".

Hi there Sniper,
Your right, game visual fidelity cannot take a jump from here at all, its the age of the artist now! (yuss )
I think id be confident enough in my studies to make a prediction on what we'll see in the next few years. Likely in the next installations of Crysis and BF.

1)

Water effects. Without a doubt water shaders and behaviour are in their infancy. Take a look at the current quote-unquote "next gen water" from DICE. Its a shoddy concoction of tessellation shaders, basic caustic effects and non-interactive waves that have been networked. In the next year or so we will see water which reacts dynamically to everything in-game. Including itself. We'll see wake and ripples that are indiscernible from reality.​

2)

As mentioned, particle behaviours.​

3)

Fully volumetric flame, smoke and explosions.​

 

Here I have a Yes and a No. I think visually we are quickly approaching the era of "diminishing returns" in graphics - for instance in the early days there was a lot of ground that was "easy" to cover - however the final 1-5% of realism will cost like the previous 40%. However, when it comes to VR (Oculus Rift), these final few percent will matter a great deal so that everything will look "just right". In 3D, fake things that one could get away with become immediately apparent

 

Please note the asterisk.
I was talking about the technological part of graphics there. It's highly unlikely that there will be a real jump forward this generation, considering the current gen consoles still cannot handle 1080p @ 60fps.

The last big leap for graphics happened all the way back in 2007 with the release of Crysis. Afterwards games slowly played catch up with it and, after reaching its graphical level, improved on it. In the same slow pace that is.

 

I think it's a matter of aesthetic taste. I have repeatedly heard criticism against many of the visual effects that have become common in modern video games:

- Lens flares
- Motion Blur
- Deph of Field
- Film Grain
- Bloom

The reason argued it more often, if I'm not mistaken, is that they are cinematic effects, not real life effects, and undermine the illusion of feel like you are there (aka immersion) because the human eye can't produce effecs similar to those of film cameras. It's a valid criticism, but in my opinion based on a false premise. I don't believe that the ultimate goal of every video game is to produce the illusion that you are actually there in the game world. Not every game has to be a simulation or similar. And not all games require me to feel that I am my character, and many actually need a conscious separation between player and character.

Personally, I love the visual effects of modern games. To name a few examples, the saturation of visual effects present in games like Metal Gear Solid V and Tom Clancy's The Division are outstanding to my taste, result of aesthetic and artistic decisions, and in the first case at least lens flares and sound effects play a major role in the gameplay also. I understand that some people don't like it, but that is the same as the fact that there are people who don't like the summer, and other people who don't like winter. You can't do much about it except try to respond to your own tastes and interests when you face the aesthetic design of your own games.

In my case, I'm considering including in the options menu the ability to enable, disable and modulate some visual effects, so that the player holds some control over the look of the game. But the fact is that I love the screen to be oversaturated of colors and shapes, and I plan to continue using them.

 

Two things comes to mind....the irony being we play games to escape reality yet they seem to focus on making games more realistic.

Also, I don't get lens flare or dirt or film grain in my eyes. A lot of those effects were consider "defects" in traditional sense that camera makers do everything they can to eliminate film grain, noise, and lens flair and yet game makers do everything they can to add it in! I want a pristine sharp clear image!!!! Not those shaky cam dirty blurry lens flare bullshit!

 

If overly beautiful, elaborate and artificial scenes break your suspension of disbelief, I'd have to guess that you're completely incapable of watching animated films.

 

It doesn't really matter about consoles in terms of graphical direction and future technologies are already available, it's just there's no point implementing them in a game engine when there's no hardware out there that can run said technology..

I was experimenting with a pre-written algorithm for real time ray tracing, even after heavy scaling and modification in several areas I couldn't get a small scene past 30.00 FPS on an R290X crossfire setup. I'm hoping the likes of Mantle could make this a viable piece of tech over the next few years. You can not beat Ray Tracing (now or in the near future) for graphical fidelity, it it ridiculously realistic..

 

And that's why movies like Death Proof by Quentin Tarantino and Planet Terror by Robert Rodríguez make such a good and exaggerated use of such effects. Trying to make the movies look ugly and imperfect they managed to create true works of visual art, bringing to mind precious memories of what it was like to watch movies in the theaters of old, and definitely making me remember many wonderful childhood moments when watching three films in a row in very poor quality movie theaters.

Again, it's a matter of taste and preference, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with the way that many modern games are made. Merely they not please everyone, as is natural and logical.

This is very interesting. I'll investigate, because I have not heard or read anything about it before.

 

It was already mentioned: Tarantino, Rodrigues and a bunch of other directors use such effects. Ever watched a J.J. Abrams movie ?

 

This is my favorite post.